August 23, 2007

Scaling Stateful Applications on Amazon EC2

A lot of people have been writing about how cool the Amazon EC2 service is -- and it is. On his blog, Mike Nicholls does a particularly good job of explaining the advantages EC2 gives to start-ups and entrepreneurs in cost-effectively and easily scaling their business.

I agree with every word Mike says, but there are is a major issue he does not address. It is that even if you have a cost-effectively scalable infrastructure, the fact remains that you need to build your app in a way that it can easily scale-out across many machines -- and grow (preferably linearly), as needed. This is a particularly big challenge when you are trying to build stateful, low-latency or data-intensive applications (or a combination thereof).

Now, we are marrying the two together -- the scalable cost-effective infrastructure of Amazon EC2 with the linear scalability of Space-Based Architecture, including for stateful, high-performance apps. You can utilize the full benefits of SBA, or just the In-Memory Data Grid.

Dekel Tankel and Alon Lahav in my team at GigaSpaces have been doing a great job on this and just today made available a public AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for the GigaSpaces XAP platform. We're still working on improvements and optimizations, but it is ready for people to start playing around with.

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Scaling Stateful Applications on Amazon EC2

A lot of people have been writing about how cool the Amazon EC2 service is -- and it is. On his blog, Mike Nicholls does a particularly good job of explaining the advantages EC2 gives to start-ups and entrepreneurs in cost-effectively and easily scaling their business.

I agree with every word Mike says, but there are is a major issue he does not address. It is that even if you have a cost-effectively scalable infrastructure, the fact remains that you need to build your app in a way that it can easily scale-out across many machines -- and grow (preferably linearly), as needed. This is a particularly big challenge when you are trying to build stateful, low-latency or data-intensive applications (or a combination thereof).

Now, we are marrying the two together -- the scalable cost-effective infrastructure of Amazon EC2 with the linear scalability of Space-Based Architecture, including for stateful, high-performance apps. You can utilize the full benefits of SBA, or just the In-Memory Data Grid.

Dekel Tankel and Alon Lahav in my team at GigaSpaces have been doing a great job on this and just today made available a public AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for the GigaSpaces XAP platform. We're still working on improvements and optimizations, but it is ready for people to start playing around with.